Saturday, 28 November 2015

YOU'LL WIN NOTHING WITH KIDS, NOT EVEN THE MEAT DRAW

Sorry for the temporary absence last week. I was in Denmark where the only thing there was to report footballistically speaking (as Arsene Wenger would say) was piece of graffiti in Herning that read 'FC Myt-Jylland Ultras FUCK Silkeborg' which was succinct and made me proud to hail from the land of Shakespeare.

To Dunston today, meanwhile here's a thing about kids at football. The children in the seats above the paddock at Carlisle count down the last ten seconds on the clock at every game with rising excitement until finally blurting out 'ZERO!' at the tops of their tiny lungs. One day someone will tell them about stoppage time.

At Brunton
Park a few Saturdays back they had given out a block of tickets to a large group of
schoolchildren who were sitting right behind me. The kids kept up an
enthusiastic chanting throughout the game, the pitch and volume of which posed
a clear danger to crystal goblets for miles around. In fact, if there's a wine
glass left intact in the Eden Valley, I'll be very surprised.

It all
took my mind back to an occasion at the Manor Ground, Oxford, a couple of
decades ago. Things had already started badly for the travelling Boro fans,
when it emerged that the spotty Herbert in the away end tea hutch had failed
fully to master the microwave and was serving meat pies that were frozen on the
outside and boiling hot in the middle. They were like a savoury baked Alaska,
in reverse. Though not much like it, admittedly.

When the
game kicked off things slid downhill like Barry Fry on a luge. As the home side
took the lead, noise levels from the Oxford junior enclosure rose ever higher.
"We love you Oxford, we do!" the children shrilled. It was like
listening to a thousand people scraping their thumbnails down a blackboard.

"You're
back to school on Monday," the Middlesbrough support chanted in a futile
bid to quell the infernal squeaking. "United! United!" the juniors
chirruped. "Fuck off, munchkins. Fuck off, munchkins" the visitors
hit back. It did no good. Luckily people soon discovered that the frozen pie
pastry made handy earplugs and the rest of the game passed in a muffled
silence.

"We
want to bring back the families" is a cry you frequently hear from those
who run the national game, though it seems to me that for decades now the
authorities have done everything they could to drive children away. Clubs these
days charge more money for mascots than Rolls-Royce.

It was
not always like this. At one time children were enlisted to provide half-time
entertainment. The penalty prize was a staple of most match days, still is in
some places. It's a simple and elegant competition, one that affords the crowd
an opportunity rarely granted to adults in our sensitive age – a chance to
loudly and roundly taunt a group of little kids. Traditionally there's a class
element to the abuse – the children from schools in working class districts are
cheered and applauded, those from establishments in the affluent suburbs
tormented as the offspring of wife-swappers and woodwork teachers.

At the
Manor Ground they used to keep fans amused during the interval with a relay
race around the outside of the pitch featuring two teams of boys from a local
primary school, one dressed in the yellow of the home side, the other in the
colours of the visitors. As they wheezed and panted round the touchline the PA
announcer would try to whip the crowd into a frenzy of excitement with his
breathless commentary, though in truth he was barely audible above the noise of
the away section chanting: "We've got all the fat lads, we've got all the
fat lads."

Luckily
at non-league grounds the child still occupies a central position in the scheme
of things. He or she is entrusted with many important duties, including scaling
the goal-netting as if it were the rigging of Captain Jack Sparrow's pirate
ship, standing in the back of the tea bar, intoning "Can I have some chips,
mam? Can I, mam? Mam? Maaaaam?" As well as the venerable task of carrying
around the blackboard with the winning raffle ticket number chalked on it. This
is a character-forming exercise since it inevitably involves the child being
subjected to disgruntled punters bellowing, "If there's only 76 people in
the crowd, how come I'm 679, you little bugger?".

Non-league
football in fact is the last stamping ground of the sporting urchin, once a
traditional feature of all British stadiums. Here they are still free to pursue
their ancient lifeways: riding around the terraces on bicycles, running up and
down the steps of a semi-deserted grandstand breaking into a chorus of "We
Are The Champions" for no apparent reason, or standing behind the goal and
calling out "We saw your bum cheeks, mister" at the opposition goalie
every time he dives for the ball.

The
latter is not quite the cakewalk it might appear. Once at Shildon, the
goalkeeper became so incensed he booted the ball down the field and chased the
urchins. They jumped over a fence and into a neighbouring garden. The game
continued until, a few minutes later, a large man came storming through the
main entrance, pushing up his shirtsleeves, with a look of grim violence on his
face. Behind were the two boys, each of them eagerly pointing at the goalie and
yelling, "That's him, Dad. That's the one who said he would kill us."
Players from both sides had to intervene to prevent a fracas.

It's easy
to get sentimental about the days when the crowd used to pass the nippers over
their heads to the front of the stand, but when you consider incidents like
that one, and the damage to your eardrums caused by the shrieking, maybe it is
better that they've priced the little rascals out of it.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.